`The Many Beautiful Things in This World'

Much of Harvey Shapiro’s poetry is facile and slack, what R. Buckminster Fuller called “ventilated prose.” A Shapiro poem is likely to be a gag, anecdote or reminiscence, hardly more than a sketch for a real poem. Without line breaks, you’d never mistake it for anything but conversational prose. The reason I’m reading The Sights Along the Harbor: New and Collected Poems, published in 2006 and containing more than 50 years of work, is that Shapiro is an old, feckless friend who can still surprise us and deliver the goods. Here, from the “New Poems” section, is the “Uses of Poetry”:

“This was a day when I did nothing,
aside from reading the newspaper,
taking both breakfast and lunch by myself
in the kitchen, dozing after lunch
until the middle of the afternoon. Then
I read one poem by Zbigniew Herbert
in which he thanked God for the many beautiful
things in this world, in a voice so absurdly
truthful, the entire wrecked day was redeemed.”

Poetry has limited utility. It can’t change the world or a mind that’s intractably made up, but it can remind us to pay attention to creation and its wonders. Herbert wrote many poems answering Shapiro’s description. As a Pole born in 1924, he endured Nazis, Soviets and their Polish sycophants, and decades of illness in a country where health care was criminally backward. But Herbert was a Stoic with a gift for gratitude. In his collection Epilogue to a Storm, published the year of his death, Herbert included four poems titled “Breviary,” any one of which could have been the poem referred to by Shapiro. Here’s the first, as translated by Alissa Valles, from The Collected Poems: 1956-1998:

“Lord
I give thanks to You for this whole jumble of life in which I have been
drowning helplessly from time immemorial, dead set on a constant
search for trifles.

“Praise be to You, that you gave me unobtrusive buttons, pins, suspenders,
spectacles, ink streams, ever hospitable blank sheets of paper, transparent
covers, folders patiently waiting.

“Lord, I give thanks to You for syringes with needles thick and hair thin,
bandages, every kind of Band-aid, the humble compress, thank you for
the drip, for saline solutions, tubes and above all for sleeping pills with
names like Roman nymphs,

“which are good, for they invite, imitate, substitute for death.”